“Humor is yours: it can’t be stolen”: Meet Putin’s Waitress (Almost)

In 2015 Olena Mykhailovska was working as a waitress in Crimea at the restaurant Poseydon, which was hosting a banquet for none other than Vladimir Putin.  He had come to town for “meeting with guys from university” which is apparently something he did regularly around Russia prior to covid.  “I could have been that close to him,” she demonstrates with a narrow pinch of her fingers, but because she was Ukrainian, she was told not to come to work that day.  “There were guys with guns, snipers everywhere, lots of security,” she reports.

Would she have done it, we ask, if she had been there?  The vegetarian Olena smirks: “No, I don’t eat pig.”  

Her electric humor and her colorful socks are two of our favorite things about Olena, now that she is our partner in providing housing, food and assistance to Ukrainian refugees in Poland.  Originally from the town of Kalush in far western Ukraine, when the war broke out, she and her mother drove their cousin’s wife and two kids across the Romanian border and around into Poland where they planned to stay.  But her mother, a biology teacher, felt she had to return to keep teaching class.    

Because Olena had spent six years studying in Wroclaw, Poland, she speaks very good Polish, Ukrainian and English, a rare and valuable combination in the current circumstances.  So when her mother returned home, she stayed and spent the first two weeks of the war at the border volunteering with the initial flood of people pouring through.  She soon found herself totally out of money, however, and in search of some sort of work when she saw our ad for a job helping refugees in Krakow.  

Now working with us full-time, Olena only half-jokingly refers to herself and Marina, our other partner, as “caseworkers.”  In addition to organizing the daily operations of the hotel and helping our guests with the routine logistics of food, travel arrangements, supplies and other necessary tasks, Olena and Marina also help solve the most complex problems facing some of our families, especially medical ones.  Marina tends to take on those whose needs can be addressed in Russian, while Olena focuses on those who require extensive interaction with Polish-language offices and services.    

Olena had been working towards her PhD in urban planning, thinking of city design in terms of engineering zero emission cities.  Then covid stalled life in Wroclaw and she repatriated to Ukraine and bought a house in the Carpathians near Snidavka close to the Romanian border.  But she calls Poland her “second homeland, where I was born for the second time.”  

Growing up in a post-communist Ukraine she said young people looked towards the EU and the West and saw a world where “life looks better, looks easy, looks comfortable.”  They would dream about the America they saw in TV and movies and think that to have a good life they had to go West.  But during the time Olena spent in Poland she began to imagine her “own country, own dream, own home.”  

Desiring a return to the fresh air, rest and natural food of the mountain life she grew up with, she also wanted to use her skills and experience to help Ukraine evolve into its own best version of itself, so during covid she and a partner bought the house with a vision of a business centered around local history and culture and mountain recreation. 

“One of my dreams was to come back home and live a normal life, a good life,” she remembers.  But then the war came and overnight the crisis had “broken all your dreams, broken all your choice.”  

Olena still struggles with the guilt of being here in Poland while so many inside Ukraine suffer.  She doesn’t know if what she’s doing here is just an excuse, a way of making herself believe she’s doing the best thing she can to help.  She turned over her mountain house to volunteers in the conflict to use as a refuge, but she constantly wonders whether she should be there with them.

That inner conflict drives her sense of mission here in Krakow.  The first time all four of us met together, we started discussing what we had to do the next day.  “Bah tomorrow,” her tiny frame bellowed.  “Tomorrow we get nuclear bombed.  What about today?”

She was scared the war had stolen her wicked wit, something she had always valued as central to her sense of self.  The first two weeks of the war she didn’t think she laughed once, was frightened she would never laugh again, and terrified the self she thought she knew had disappeared forever.  But somewhere, somehow she found it, with a fury.  

“Laughing is the best way to deal with problems,” Olena promises.  “Humor is yours: it can’t be stolen.”